Wild Relatives by Jumana Manna

Oscillating between the Arctic town of Longyearbyen in Svalbard, and the agricultural fields of the Bekaa in Lebanon, Wild Relatives touches on the complex and long ranging effects of the war in Syria.The film highlights the fraught relationship between benevolent states, such as Norway, and those receiving aid, and ongoing manmade and natural threats to biodiversity. In 2015, seeds from the Global Seed Vault were withdrawn for the first time ever when a major gene bank in Aleppo was forcefully abandoned. Wild Relatives uncovers the entangled network of human and non-human lives implicated in the harvesting and freezing of endangered seeds.